d&b Noizcalc saves the day for Gentse Feesten
20-07-2023Gentse Feesten is one of the largest city festivals in Europe, averaging around 1.5M visitors throughout the week’s festivities. Taking place every year around the third week of July and lasting 10 days, the city centre closed to traffic and thrown open to revellers who can enjoy anything from a simple drink with friends to street artists and of course plenty of top class artists performing on numerous stages and venues throughout the city.
Vlasmarkt
The historic Vlasmarkt Square is the beating heart of Ghent’s trendy music and café culture scene. City Sounds Rent were responsible for production for the Vlasmarkt Square stage, and they specified a significant d&b system to ensure complete coverage of the listening area. However, City Sounds Rent were concerned about potential noise pollution beyond the listening zone.
Sound propagation
Peter Claes is an independent noise abatement consultant who works for the city of Ghent for the last 14 years. Using the ArrayCalc system data from the simulations created by Amptec for the Vlasmarkt Square system, Claes created a noise grid map using d&b’s NoizCalc software to show precisely how the sound was being propagated. It was immediately apparent that there was a lot of spillage into neighbouring areas caused by the long narrow street leading from the square where the transmission of low frequencies was extremely high.
Amptec recommended a flown horizontal sub array rather than flying the subs in one vertical array behind the main PA. A second round of ArrayCalc/NoizCalc simulations proved our recommendations to be right on the money, demonstrating significant noise reductions in all areas outside the event zone. “Noise prediction software is immensely helpful in these situations as it takes all the guesswork out of what would have been a process of trial and error,” says Claes. “NoizCalc enables us to make accurate predictions for a variety of scenarios before we even think about flying the PA – it’s a fantastic tool to avoid noise disturbance.”
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